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Queen, to present a petition for the speedy execution of Mary. In the previous February he had been admitted to the high table at Gray’s Inn, and in due course became a bencher, Beyond the fact that he was on the ‘Committees appointed for conference touching a loan or benevolence to be offered to Her Majesty,’ and of the Bill for Attainder, and that he was one of those sent up to confer with the Lords about the Bill for continuance of Statutes, we hear no more of Bacon during the present Parliament. The next finds him member for Liverpool, busy on frequent committees, and reporting their proceedings to the House. The Marprelate controversy was now at its height, and Bacon delivered his judgement, full of wisdom and moderation, on the points in dispute, in a paper which remained unprinted during his lifetime, called ‘An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England.’ It contains the germs of his essay ‘Of Unity in Religion.’

In 1589 he received his first piece of preferment in the form of the reversion of an office, which however did not fall in for nearly twenty years. Under the date of Oct. in this year we find the entry in Burghley’s printed diary, ‘A Graunt of the Office of Clerk of the Counsell in the Starr Chamber to Francis Bacon.’ The office was worth 1600/. or 2000/. a year, and was executed by deputy, but Bacon had to exercise the patience of hope till July 16, 1608; and meanwhile, as he said himself, ‘it was like another man’s ground buttalling upon his house, which might mend his prospect, but it did not fill his barn.’ (Rawley.) He was a poor man in purse for many years to come, toiling in a profession in which his heart was not; but, as he writes to Burghley, with as vast contemplative ends as he had moderate civil ends, for he had taken all knowledge to be his province. His highest ambition at this time was to be put in an office which should place him above the reach of want and leave him leisure to prosecute his intellectual conquests. This was the career he longed for at thirty-one, and it is important to bear it in mind as helping in some degree to vindicate his motives in later life.